We are announcing that, after 7 years of running the monthly photo contest for our members, we are phasing it out at the end of February.

Though the contest does have a strong active base of regulars, it is only serving a small percentage of our membership. The resources that we allocate to keeping it running are not doing enough for our membership as a whole.

We enjoy holding the contest and are considering potential alternative formats for the future. Any thoughts, ideas, suggestions or feedback that you have regarding this are greatly appreciated. Please post in the comments below.

12 comments on “The Monthly Photo Contest is Winding Down”

My first reaction is disappointment. I am strictly an amateur photographer and the Redframe contest, seemingly, was one of the few that I can enter without an entrance fee. Also, though not specific, the voting by peers gave some feedback to my work. Lastly, an added benefit was exposure to the website of others.

Hi Pete, thanks for your input. We liked the concept of running the contest but it never really gained the traction that it needed for use to continue to commit resources towards it. Shutting it down was a tough decision and we hope to come up with some sort of alternative that works better for all our subscribers.

Ahhhhh! No!!!! Bad decision. I love the photo contest and always look forward in entering. Can this be expanded out to other people? Facebook maybe? A Facebook Reframe group holding a monthly competition which would also act as advertising for the website – same prize just more people and non-redframe members can enter??

Hi David, we have definitely considered running the contest on Facebook and it remains a possibility. In the past, some users and photo contest regulars were definitely against having their images posted on Facebook or other social media outlets. We would need to decide if reluctance has abated. I definitely fell that any future version of the contest will be at least viewable to the general public.

Well, I agree with Marc that I too am disappointed the contests are ending. I feel it is an opportunity to be judged by our peers and have positive and reflexive feedback on our given choices without fees or a popularity contest as so many other online photo contest end up being. I hope you will have some brainstorming meeting soon to revamp this great interaction for Red Frame members to interface and compare passions and works.

Hi Everyone;
I have to share my disappointment as well ! Over my the many years sharing images in the contests many of us have developed a unique family here in the photographic world which in some cases have become freindships ! It is a good way to express our work to our peers but also wish the public could also have been involved during the contests somehow ! It is great to get praise and critique from our peers but we also want to reach the world in as many ways as possible !
Every month I entered I looked forward to seeing how everyone including myself did in the contest and what everyone was looking for in the voting!
For the people just starting out in photography it is a great way to learn from others how to do certain elements and how to tweek and improve their work!
I appreciated all the comments and votes I received over the years ! Some I will never forget so thank you all!
Hope we can get this rolling again perhaps if Redframe found some advertising sponsers, Canon, Nikon, Minolta, Sony, etc that would alleviate some of the” resources” needed !
Cheers Mike

Thank you for your input Mike. We know that the contest fostered great relationships between many of our members and valued that aspect of it. When I refer to resources needed I was not trying to imply that we didn’t want to keep handing out monthly prizes. It is more of an issue of the contest being run on software that we built many years ago that requires more and more care and attention as it ages but is serving a smaller proportion of our customers as we continue to grow. We realize that if we had built a more robust platform years ago we probably wouldn’t need to make this decision now.

While I looked forward to watching the entries of the photo contest, and the winners, I got the impression that the same people or person were picking the winners.

Most of the photographs that placed, had the emphasis on HDR or over saturated images it seemed. While I like HDR images, there were other beautiful photographs that were natural photographs without post production effects added that never seem to make the top three.

As well, while I never voted for myself, but did enter comments & added ‘stars’ for other members who enterted, I didn’t think that people submitting photographs should be able to vote for themselves.

I agree that an entrant should not be able to vote for their own image as it seems outside of the spirit of things. We have had not any indication that was ever a problem, but If we build another version from scratch or use a third party to operate a new version, we would look to have a feature that prevented self-voting from being an option. Thanks for your suggestion.